Hard, humbling time

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<cutline_leadin>ON THE JOB:</cutline_leadin>Ted Parsons went back to work Sept. 10 after recovering from a stroke.

<cutline_leadin>BACK TO WORK:</cutline_leadin>Ted Parsons works on an Acme Screw Machine his first day back to work at Alcoa Fastening Systems in Carson where he is a machinist.

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<cutline_leadin>DAYS LEFT BEHIND: </cutline_leadin>Ted Parsons, 53 of Santa Ana, and his wife, Sue, lived in their car for two and a half months last year after a series of near-strokes left him unable to work and cost him his job as a machinist.

<cutline_leadin>"IT'S A PALACE:" </cutline_leadin>Sue Parsons of Santa Ana says her current home is palatial compared to living in a '97 Chevy Cavalier. Her husband Ted, added the closet in background to the Santa Ana room they rent.

When Teddy Parsons was out of money and facing homelessness, he came back to Orange County.

Last Sept. 23, Teddy and his fiancee, Sue, parked their 1997 Chevrolet Cavalier at a Costa Mesa motel. They didn’t check in. They folded down the back seat and slept in the car.

“We had talked – and God, it was very emotional and tough,” Teddy, 53, says. “Our back seat was full of luggage and everything, so we had to put everything in the front seat and kind of make a bed the best that we could.”

Teddy had been working as a machinist in Ontario. Inside the San Bernardino County shop, the temperature soared to 100 degrees in August. Teddy, who suffers from hypertension, began having fainting spells and had to take some time off. He’d been on the job less than three months.

Before he could return to work, the company fired him, just one day before he would have qualified for health benefits, he says.

Teddy and Sue packed up and headed for Texas, where they’d been living before moving to Ontario. They stopped in Las Vegas, planning to get married after 13 years together, but Teddy suffered a near-stroke and had to be hospitalized. When he got out, their money was almost gone.

Teddy knew he wasn’t strong enough to drive all the way back to Texas. So he and Sue headed for Orange County, where he had lived in the 1980s.

“When you’re stuck someplace where you don’t know anybody … and you don’t have the money to go very far, then you pick the closest place that you’re familiar with,” Sue says.

“I’d never considered that I’d end up like this, and I really didn’t know what to do,” Teddy says.

On their third or fourth night of sleeping in the motel parking lot, they were woken by a loud rap on the window at about 2 a.m. A police officer told them there was a $250 fine for sleeping in a car in Costa Mesa. After hearing Teddy’s story, the cop let them off without a ticket, but he advised them to find another city to sleep in.

Teddy and Sue began parking their car at a hospital in Newport Beach. The hospital’s parking structure is open all night with people coming and going, so they could sleep unnoticed.

During the day, Teddy tried to find work. But when your washroom is in the Santa Ana train station, it’s tough.

“The depression set in and the hopelessness,” Teddy says. “You know, after a while, you lose your dignity.”

MOVING AROUND

During Teddy’s first stint in Orange County, in the 1980s, he worked at a Newport Beach aircraft-parts company called Rosan Inc.

“Those were good times,” he says. “We had a condominium at Segerstrom and MacArthur, and the kids were growing up, and the wife went to work for Nissan Corp. We had a stable and a good life.”

It didn’t last. His marriage broke up. Teddy returned to Michigan, where he’d lived as a young man. He remarried and fathered a son. Then his second wife committed suicide. He let his sister adopt the baby boy.

“My life was a mess,” Teddy says. “I was drinking.”

But Teddy is a skilled machinist, and even during those dark days, he had no problem finding work. “I’m very good at what I do,” he says.

Teddy took jobs all over the country. He lived in Atlanta, Denver, Nashville.

He met Sue in Michigan in 1993. She was tending bar. When he left for a new job, she went with him.

Teddy worked long hours, and with overtime, he earned as much as $78,000 one year. He enjoyed the things money could buy.

“I had to have the new truck and the high-definition TV, but I never had no peace of mind,” he says. “There wasn’t the balance in my life. When I wanted something, I wanted it now.”

For a time, he and Sue rented a home on 2.5 acres near Dallas. The younger of his two daughters, Lisa Marquez, 31, came to live with them, bringing her own young daughter.

“That didn’t go real well,” Lisa says. Teddy was working 60 hours a week and coming home stressed out. He was drinking.

His free-spending past caught up with him after he moved back to California last year.

Teddy’s other daughter, who lives in Riverside, had been injured in a rollover accident. Teddy and Sue decided to live nearby while she recovered.

Teddy, confident as ever, lined up the job in Ontario. It would be three months before he’d qualify for health insurance, three months in which he wouldn’t be able to afford his $700-a-month blood-pressure medicine.

A HAND UP

After a lifetime in the middle class, Teddy and Sue suffered during their three months of homelessness. Teddy didn’t let his daughters know what he was going through.

“People kind of look at you and kind of shun you, and you slowly lose that self-respect and that self-confidence, and people pick up on that,” says Sue, who married Teddy in December.

Through people they met at a food bank, they found a place to stay. Enrique Quintero, a deeply religious Santa Ana man who speaks little English, let them have two rooms at the back of his house. Quintero didn’t mind that they couldn’t pay any rent at first.

With his health improving, Teddy found a job at Alcoa Fastening Systems in Carson paying $23 an hour. He started in April. Alcoa’s health benefits kicked in his first day on the job.

Then, a setback. On June 5, Teddy suffered a full-fledged stroke. He was hospitalized for 11 days. One of his doctors urged him to retire.

Retirement wasn’t financially feasible.

Alcoa kept Teddy on its health insurance plan for three months while he wasn’t working. He got the medical care he needed and returned to work Sept. 10.

The whole experience, Teddy says, has been humbling. He and Sue don’t have a stove or running water in their apartment, but after what they’ve been through, he considers that “a minor inconvenience.”

His daughter Lisa saw a transformation in Teddy when they met in August. His ability to find happiness in straitened circumstances surprised her. He hasn’t had a drink in a year. “The change is amazing,” she says.

Teddy says, “I am more at peace with myself now than I’ve ever been at my whole life.”

When Teddy returned to his job at Alcoa last week, his colleagues were glad to see him. “The skill that Ted has acquired is a hard-to-come-by skill,” says Dave Cardona, the human resources manager. “We need him.”

Teddy was pleased too. “It felt good to be back among my co-workers – and to get in there and start wrenching.”